Bøker av Joseph Straus

Operating largely within the world of European-American classical music, this book discusses the creative work of old musicians--composers, performers, listeners, and scholars--and how those forms of music-making are received and understood. Like everything else about old age, music-making is usually understood as a decline from a former height, a deficiency with respect to a youthful standard. Against this ageist mythology, this book argues that composing oldly, performing oldly, and listening oldly are distinctive and valuable way of making music--a difference, not a deficit; to be celebrated, not ignored or condemned.Instead of the usual biomedical or gerontological understanding of old age, with its focus on bodily, cognitive, and sensory decline, this book follows Age Studies in seeing old age through a cultural lens, as something created and understood in culture. This book seeks to identify the ways that old musicians (composers, performers, listeners, and scholars) accept, resist, adapt, and transform the cultural scripts for the performance of old age. Musicking oldly (making music in old age) often represents an attempt to rewrite ageist cultural scripts and to find ways of flourishing musically in a largely hostile landscape.

For undergraduate/graduate-level courses in Twentieth-Century Techniques, and Post-Tonal Theory and Analysis taken by music majors.A primerrather than a surveythis text offers exceptionally clear, simple explanations of basic theoretical concepts for the post-tonal music of the twentieth century. Emphasizing hands-on contact with the musicthrough playing, singing, listening, and analyzingit provides six chapters on theory, each illustrated with musical examples and fully worked-out analyses, all drawn largely from the classical pre-war repertoire by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Berg, and Webern. Straus takes a paced, methodical, logical approach to each topic. He introduces it in context and perhaps most significantly of all uses language that's so transparent that merely to follow his descriptions, explanations and illustrations carefully is to understand each aspect of the theory under consideration. Mark Sealey, Classical.net